Résumé

The term adaptive biometric systems refers to biometric recognition systems in which an algorithm aimed to fol- low variations of the clients appearance has been imple- mented. Among others, the self update algorithm is used when only one biometric is available, and is able to add to the clients gallery novel data collected during system operation, on the basis of a updating threshold: if the novel data, compared with existing template(s), provide a matching score higher than the given threshold, they are added to the gallery. In order to avoid misclassification er- rors, thus inserting impostors into the clients gallery, this threshold is very conservative. Self-update algorithm has shown to be effective for many biometrics. However, no work tried to explain, so far, why self-update should work, in particular when a very conservative update threshold is used (zeroFAR threshold). This is the goal of the present paper, which provides a conceptual explanation of the self update mechanism coupled with a set of experiments on a publicly available data set explicitly designed for studying adaptive biometric systems.